EIGHT
YEARS ago Barack Obama was thoroughly humiliated at the Democratic
Convention in Los Angeles. He had recently lost a congressional primary
in Chicago, and both his political and personal bank accounts were
empty. The rental car company rejected his credit card. He failed to
get hold of a floor pass and ended up watching the proceedings on a big
screen in a car park. He returned home with his tail between his legs
before the week was out—and left the celebrations to the people who
mattered, not least the Clintons, who took every chance to seize the
limelight from the Gores.

This year Mr
Obama is the Democratic convention. The Pepsi Centre in Denver will be
chock-a-block with people cheering about “hope” and “change”. On August
28th Mr Obama will deliver his acceptance speech at a local football
stadium, Invesco Field, before an audience of more than 70,000. The man
who could not get a floor pass in Los Angeles has a better than even
chance of winning the presidential election in November—the current
Intrade market odds are running 61 to 38 in his favour—and thereby
becoming America’s first non-white president.

Mr Obama has
gripped America’s imagination, and indeed the world’s, like nobody
since the last Democratic senator to win the presidency, John Kennedy.
Across the country, from freezing Iowa to hotter-than-hell Nevada, huge
armies of Americans have queued for hours to listen to his speeches.
Few have been disappointed. Mr Obama looks too frail to bear the weight
of all the expectations that have been loaded upon him—like a gangly
graduate student rather than a political titan. But “frailty” is the
last word that comes to mind when you see him in action. One
conservative compared his reaction to seeing Obama on stage to that of
the hero of “Jaws” when he sees the monstrous shark—“We’re gonna need a
bigger boat.”

Obamamania has inevitably produced a backlash: anti-Obama books are currently riding high in the New York Times
bestseller list. But his achievement remains extraordinary. George Bush
was the son of a president and grandson of a senator. Mr Obama is the
son of a Kenyan student who abandoned young Barack when he was only
two. Mr Obama enjoyed a career which puts his born-in-the-purple
predecessor to shame: he was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review,
the author of two good, if narcissistic, books (which, breaking the
political mould, he wrote himself) and a senator by his mid-40s. He has
thriven in post-September-11th America despite the fact that his father
was a nominal Muslim and his middle name is Hussein.

Mr Obama
seized his party’s nomination from the most powerful machine in
Democratic politics: a machine created by the first two-term Democratic
president since FDR and inherited by a woman who combined the clout of
an insider with the promise of becoming the first female president in
American history. (Women make up more than 50% of the population,
blacks are a mere 12%.) Mr Obama’s supporters argue that he
demonstrated both judgment and character in coming out against the
hugely popular Iraq invasion. He predicted that the war would be “of
undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined
consequences”. They also argue that his magnetic appeal to young people
offers his party the chance to win over an entire generation, much as
Ronald Reagan did in the 1980s.

Mr Obama thus
represents extraordinary opportunities for the Democratic Party; but
there are huge risks, too. He lost a succession of big swing states,
including Pennsylvania and Ohio, during the primaries. Some of the most
important swing groups in the country remain deeply suspicious of his
arugula-flavoured politics. Exit polls show that in the primary season
Mr Obama won only about a third of Latinos, Catholics, whites without
college degrees and whites over 60. This is doubly worrying for
Democrats given the appeal of his Republican rival, John McCain, to
independents, blue-collar types and older folk. Many Americans remain
to be persuaded, and are still full of questions.

Who is
Barack Obama? The best clues to that riddle can be gleaned from his two
volumes of autobiography. He spent the first half of his life in search
of a stable identity. He looked “black”. But he was the son of a white
mother from Kansas and an African, rather than an African-American,
father from Kenya. He spent four years in Indonesia, where he attended
local schools (including a Muslim one) and ate local delicacies such as
dog, grasshopper and snake, on which his stepfather fed him. He
eventually ended up living with his white grandparents in Hawaii.

The young
Obama flirted with the “blackness” of the inner-city, growing an Afro,
skimping on school work and experimenting with marijuana and a little
cocaine. But he eventually pulled himself together and joined the
American meritocracy, attending Occidental College, Columbia University
and, later, Harvard Law School.

Mr Obama
found the answer to his search for identity in black Chicago. He
started his career as a “community organiser” on Chicago’s South Side,
the largest black community in the country. He joined one of the city’s
most prominent black churches, Trinity United, and abandoned his
youthful agnosticism in favour of Christianity (Trinity’s Afrocentric
bent, with its African visitors and women dressed in African robes, may
have particularly appealed to the son of an African). He married a
black woman with deep roots on the South Side, and had his two
daughters baptised at Trinity.

The rootless
cosmopolitan now had roots for the first time in his life. But Mr Obama
was determined not to be trapped by black politics. This was partly a
matter of generational change. Mr Obama is part of a new wave of black
politicians such as Michael Nutter, the mayor of Philadelphia, and
Deval Patrick, the governor of Massachusetts, who have embraced
post-racial politics. But it was also a matter of raw ambition. “He’s
always wanted to be president,” admits Valerie Jarrett, one of his
closest advisers. Mr Obama realised that his post-racial identity was a
golden ticket to the White House.

Personality
partly explains how he has risen so far, so fast. But he has also
enjoyed a charmed political career. His Republican opponent for the
Illinois Senate seat, Jack Ryan, self-destructed when it was revealed
that he forced his wife to attend sex clubs “with cages, whips and
other apparatus hanging from the ceiling”. Mr Ryan’s replacement was
one of the standing jokes of American politics, Alan Keyes. “All I had
to do was keep my mouth shut”, Mr Obama confessed, “and start planning
my swearing-in ceremony.”

There
remains a mystery about his politics. David Mundell, his most thorough
biographer, refers to his “ingenious lack of specificity”. One
Democratic activist has called him “a kind of human Rorschach test”. Mr
Obama himself confesses that “I serve as a blank screen on which people
of vastly different stripes project their own views. As such, I am
bound to disappoint some, if not all, of them.”

So what does
Mr Obama stand for? There are two well-rehearsed answers to the first
question—one popular with his supporters, one popular with his
opponents. Both are wrong.

The
pro-Obama answer is that the young senator is a reformer without
parallel, a change-maker and mould-breaker. Mr Obama’s campaign has
been based on the twin promises of “change” and “hope”. The American
political system is broken, the argument goes, dominated by special
interests, divided by political hacks and disfigured by an unnecessary
civil war between “red” (Republican) and “blue” (Democratic) America.
Mr Obama promises to dethrone the lobbyists and reach out to people of
goodwill, of whatever persuasion, who want to take back control of
their country.

The problem
with this argument is that Mr Obama has never pursued a serious reform
agenda in any job he has held. He eased his way into his first job in
politics, as a state senator in Illinois, by using a “petitions guru”
to challenge the signatures his rival, Alice Palmer, had obtained to
qualify for the ballot, an extraordinary move for a man who had made
his name trying to get poor people to vote. He had a see-no-evil
attitude to the Chicago political machine, one of the most corrupt in
the country. (John Kass, a columnist on the Chicago Tribune,
described his record as that of a man who “won’t make no waves and
won’t back no losers”.) He had a disturbingly close relationship with
Tony Rezko, a Chicago property magnate who made his career doing
favours for politicians who could open doors to real-estate contracts,
and who is now in prison. Mr Rezko contributed $250,000 to Mr Obama
over his career, and bought a lot next to his house.

This
go-along-to-get-along attitude continued once Mr Obama had made it to
the Senate in Washington. He supported the farm bill and the override
of the president’s veto, despite the fact that the bill sprayed money
at agri-business and raised barriers against farmers in the developing
world. A raft of pork projects, including Alaska’s “bridge to nowhere”,
received his support. He used his star power to raise money for his
political action committee, Hope Fund, and then disbursed nearly
$300,000 to Democrats who might be useful in his election bid. The man
who promises to reform America’s political system is the first
presidential candidate ever to reject public funds for the general
election.

The
anti-Obama argument is that the Illinois senator is a “stealth
liberal”: a man who talks inclusive talk but is bent on advancing
hard-core “progressive” policies. Mr Obama is a disciple of Saul
Alinsky, an activist who expanded the labour movement’s agenda to
include a wide range of grievances beyond the workplace. His friends in
Chicago included Jeremiah Wright, his long-time pastor, who believes
that September 11th represented America’s chickens coming home to
roost, and Bill Ayers, a former member of the terrorist Weathermen. The
National Journal rated Mr Obama as the most liberal senator in 2007, to the left of Barbara Boxer and Ted Kennedy.

This ignores
Mr Obama’s essential pragmatism. At every stage of his career he has
calibrated the balance of political forces and adjusted his behaviour
accordingly—embracing big-city liberalism when he was a Chicago
politician, moving to the centre when he won his party’s presidential
nomination. His personal style, too, is conciliatory. Everybody who has
worked with him comments on his ability to forge relations with
Republicans and conservatives. He prefers compromise and conciliation
to confrontation.

Mr Obama’s
most impressive achievement has been his outmanoeuvring of the mighty
Clinton machine. There, too, as in his Senate race, he was greatly
helped by outside factors. His ascent was the culmination of a shift in
the balance of power in the Democratic Party that began with George
McGovern in the late 1960s: the rise of the knowledge elite. Mr Obama’s
political base lay in what John Judis and Ruy Teixeira have called
“ideopolises”—cities such as San Francisco and Madison, Wisconsin,
which are rich in academics and professionals. He encountered the
stiffest resistance among blue-collar voters in rural Appalachia and in
the decaying manufacturing towns of rustbelt America.

Mr Obama’s
mixed-race ancestry helped to supercharge his liberal base. His
hard-core supporters regard him not just as a “change agent” but also
as a “transformational figure”—a man who, simply by dint of who he is,
can repair America’s global image and, more important, make amends for
the country’s racist past. His ancestry also provided him with the
solid support of one of the party’s solidest non-elite constituencies,
people who have done much of the party’s grunt work, black America.

His other trump card has been a talent for organisation. The Obama campaign, directed by David Axelrod (see article),
has been the best-run in recent Democratic history, strikingly free of
the personality clashes and general chaos that doomed Mrs Clinton’s
efforts. It also outperformed the seasoned Clinton machine by every
possible measure—raising more money, understanding the importance of
the caucus states and mastering momentum.

Mr Obama
understood from the first the power of the promise of “change” when
two-thirds of Americans said the country was heading the wrong way. He
made better use of new technology, such as social-networking sites,
than any previous candidate. He also struck the perfect balance between
central direction and popular enthusiasm—building support from the
bottom up but also giving his volunteers clear goals and tough
standards.

This will
set him in good stead for the November election. Karl Rove, Mr Bush’s
former strategist-in-chief, has frequently argued that the president
mostly owed his re-election in 2004 to the fact that the campaign had
recruited 1.4m volunteers. According to Ron Brownstein of the National Journal,
the Obama campaign thinks it may be able to turn out four times that
number, with local organisations in all 50 states. These volunteers
will act both as grass-roots organisers and as “local validators”,
working to persuade their friends and neighbours to vote for a man who,
in his words, does not look like any of the other presidents on the
currency.

What sort of
president will Mr Obama make if he wins in November? His preference for
avoiding specifics makes it particularly difficult to answer this
question. As a senator, he has few legislative achievements to his
credit—he has been running for the presidency since arriving in
Washington—and no executive experience. But some things are clear. He
will have everything going for him. The Democrats are likely to pick up
another ten to 20 seats in the House and five to seven in the Senate.
The defeated Republican Party will also be torn apart by a civil war
over what it stands for and where it should be going. The press will
swoon over America’s first black president. Much of the rest of the
world, particularly the Europeans, will be captivated by the idea of
the rebirth of “good America” after the disastrous Bush years.

Illustration by Matt Herring

Mr Obama’s
talent for organisation suggests that he will create a smooth-working
White House. One foreign-policy grandee was struck, in an early meeting
with Mr Obama, by his interest in making things run efficiently, and
particularly by his concern that the National Security Council should
operate more effectively than it did under Condoleezza Rice.

He is also
likely to make a virtue of his “reasonableness”, trying to reach out to
the opposition and listening, as Mr Bush seldom does, to all sides of
the argument. But his propensity for being all things to all men will
inevitably produce disappointment. Mr Obama has presented himself as a
business-friendly fellow, for example, frequently visiting the funding
wells of Silicon Valley and Wall Street. But he will also be massively
indebted to a labour movement that has devoted huge resources to
getting him elected.

Not least
because of inexperience, Mr Obama will probably pursue a cautious
foreign policy. Paradoxically, the success of the “surge” in Baghdad,
which he adamantly opposed, makes it more likely that he will be able
to deliver on one of his central promises, to shift the focus of the
“war on terror” from Iraq to Afghanistan and its lawless border with
Pakistan. The Obama administration will introduce a revolution in
America’s attitude to climate change. It will also make a virtue of
working through multilateral institutions—something that Mr Bush never
regarded as anything more than a necessary evil. But recent events,
particularly Russia’s invasion of Georgia, suggest that he will spend
most of his time swatting away crises and trying to extricate America
from Iraq, rather than forging a new foreign-policy doctrine.

On the home
front, Mr Obama is likely to devote much of his political capital to
health-care reform. He wants to provide near-universal coverage through
a combination of expanded government coverage, subsidies for the poor
and regulation for companies and insurance providers. He is unlikely to
be as hostile to free trade as his NAFTA-bashing rhetoric during the
campaign suggested. But his tax plans will redistribute wealth from the
rich, who have done fabulously over the past couple of decades; and his
combination of expanded government activism and middle-class tax cuts
will exacerbate one of America’s biggest structural problems, its
horrific budget deficit.

Whatever
happens in November, Mr Obama’s candidacy still marks an important
turning-point in American history. The upper reaches of American
politics have recently begun to look both plutocratic and incestuous:
Mr Obama’s chief rival for the nomination was the wife of George Bush’s
predecessor. Post-September-11th America was also gripped by a
patriotic frenzy that threatened to degenerate into Muslim-bashing
jingoism. Mr Obama is a genuine meritocrat who climbed the greasy pole
on the basis of his own grit and determination. He is also the
descendant of African Muslims, whose first name means “blessed” in
Arabic.

Most of all,
Mr Obama is a black man in a country that denied black people the vote
as recently as 1964. Across the South, elderly black people who turned
up to vote for Mr Obama in the primaries told stories of how they were
once denied the vote on manufactured technicalities. Mr Obama will
deliver his acceptance speech in Denver on the 45th anniversary of
Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. That, in itself, is an
extraordinary comment on how far America has come over the past
half-century.

ONE
of the great ironies of the Obama campaign is that the man responsible
for crafting the candidate’s hope-filled image is one of the
unhappiest-looking men in American politics. David Axelrod persuaded a
reluctant Barack Obama to embrace the “Yes We Can” slogan. He insisted
from the first that the campaign should be built on the twin pillars of
“hope” and “change”. But with his sad eyes and drooping moustache, Mr
Axelrod has a perpetual air of gloom hanging over him.

He is
currently the leading member of one of America’s most powerful
clubs—the consultants, spin-meisters, string-pullers and
behind-the-scenes operatives who run political campaigns. They are not
elected to anything. But they shape American politics just as surely as
their glad-handing front-men. Some of them, like Karl Rove (who worked
for George Bush until last year) and James Carville (Bill Clinton) in
the current generation, and Lee Atwater (George Bush senior) in the
previous one, become famous; most of them are perfectly content to grow
fat and powerful in the shadows.

Mr Axelrod’s
formal title is “chief strategist”. But that hugely understates his
influence. He has known the candidate for 16 years, longer than any of
the other political operatives around him. He has helped to craft his
image, put together his political team, provide him with national
political connections and generally turn him into the phenomenon that
he is today. In a political campaign that prides itself on its lack of
hierarchy, “the Ax”, as he is generally known, is first among equals.

Mr Axelrod
has been the leading political consultant in Chicago for more than two
decades. He helped run Richard Daley’s successful campaign to reclaim
his father’s job as mayor of Chicago; he also helped Rahm Emanuel, now
one of the Democratic Party’s most powerful figures, to win his
congressional seat. Mr Axelrod’s local success earned him a national
reputation. Since 2002 his consultancy has worked on 42 primary or
general-election campaigns around the country and won 33 of them—an 80%
success rate. He has worked at one time or another for five of the
Democratic candidates in the recent race (Mr Obama plus Hillary
Clinton, John Edwards, Chris Dodd and Tom Vilsack). One of his
specialities is “packaging black candidates for white voters”. His list
of black successes includes John Street, the former mayor of
Philadelphia, and Deval Patrick, the governor of Massachusetts, whose
speeches sometimes bear an uncanny resemblance to Mr Obama’s. One
possible weakness, though, is that his expertise is mainly weighted
towards winning urban battles.

One of Mr
Obama’s luckiest breaks in a luck-laden career came in 2003, when Mr
Axelrod agreed to run his Senate campaign rather than that of another
potential client, Blair Hull, a fabulously rich investor. Mr Axelrod
immediately grasped that he could sell his new client, with his
mixed-race background and Ivy League pedigree, to both Chicago’s
“lakefront liberals” and its black working class. He simultaneously set
about using his contacts in the Washington press corps to present Mr
Obama as a national star in the making.

Mr Axelrod
has succeeded in imposing extraordinary discipline on the campaign. The
Clinton campaign was a nest of hissing vipers, in which egotistical
operatives such as Mark Penn and Howard Wolfson spent their time
pursuing contradictory strategies and leaking to the press. The Obama
campaign, by contrast, has been miraculously free from such woes. Mr
Axelrod cleverly decided to install his friend and business partner,
David Plouffe, a man who relishes the mechanics of getting out the
vote, as campaign manager, creating a highly effective “axis of
Davids”.

This
discipline has been particularly notable when it comes to message
control. The Obama campaign has stuck to the same message through thick
and thin: when they were 20-plus points behind Mrs Clinton in the
polls, and when they were racking up a succession of victories in
February. This allowed them to create a clear brand identity for their
neophyte candidate, even as Mrs Clinton dithered between presenting
herself as a warrior queen, ready for a 3am call, or a put-upon
everywoman fighting off tears.

Mr Axelrod
has won nothing but applause for his performance during the primaries.
But now that the general-election campaign has, in effect, begun, some
Democrats are worrying that his magic touch may be deserting him. Why
is Mr Obama stuck in the polls? And why is he less popular than his
party? Some Democrats worry that he is not prepared to hit John McCain
hard enough. This seems unlikely. Mr Axelrod is a product of Chicago’s
street-fighting school of politics. Ed Rollins, a veteran Republican
strategist, puts him at the head of his list of “Guys I never want to
see lobbing grenades at me again”.

The bigger
problem lies with what has hitherto been the Obama campaign’s greatest
strength—message control. Mr Axelrod firmly believes that the candidate
is the message. The important thing is to tell a positive story about
the candidate rather than to muddy the narrative with lots of talk
about policy details.

This worked
perfectly when Mr Obama was up against Mrs Clinton, a woman who agreed
with him on most points of substance and whose own autobiography is
messy, to put it mildly. But things are different with Mr McCain. As a
Republican, Mr McCain is on the losing side of most policy issues,
particularly when it comes to economic and domestic policy. But Mr
Obama has still not figured out how to relate his grand rhetoric to the
numerous specific policy positions that litter his website.
Mr McCain also has one of the most compelling autobiographies in
American politics—one that is more likely to appeal to the average
American than the coming-of-age of a mixed-race child. For all his
skills, Mr Axelrod may have chosen to fight on the one battlefield
where the Republicans have a chance of winning.

ON
AUGUST 28th, barring some dark manoeuvre by seething Clintonistas,
Barack Obama will accept the Democratic nomination for the presidency.
Forty-five years to the day after Martin Luther King spoke of his
dream, America will take a giant leap towards the realisation of that
great call for justice. Hundreds of millions will watch, and be moved;
Mr Obama seems to many, by reason of his race, his calm intelligence,
his youthful good looks and his powerful oratorical skills, to be well
suited to draw a line beneath the bitter Bush years and to repair
America’s torn relationship with the outside world. One prominent
pundit was much derided earlier this year for describing the tingle he
got from listening to the candidate—but everyone knew exactly what he
meant.

This moment
comes as much through perspiration as through inspiration. Mr Obama’s
achievement in defeating the Clinton machine was monumental. Hillary
Clinton started out as the overwhelming favourite, with the Democratic
Party establishment, not to mention its big-ticket donors, squarely
behind her and poll leads that sometimes topped 20 percentage points.
But Mr Obama ran a brilliant campaign, using the internet to harness
the energy and the donations of an army of volunteers, and deploying
them with tactical skill in almost every state. He managed the
firestorm touched off by his intemperate pastor, Jeremiah Wright, with
dignity and, eventually, ruthlessness.

When it comes to the issues, it is hardly surprising that The Economist
is less impressed. Mr Obama’s tilt towards protectionism during the
primary campaign was both wrong and dangerous. So was his insistence on
denying funds to the “surge” that has worked so well (if belatedly) in
Iraq, and his determination to withdraw troops from the conflict
according to a rigid timetable. We are nervous about his
incentive-destroying willingness to raise taxes sharply on the
well-off, and of the cost implications of many of his policies. But we
recognise that his positions have evolved as the campaign has moved
from the primary stage, where politicians have to outdo each other in
their appeal to their party faithful, to the general election. Were he
to become president, they would move further to the centre again. And
policies are by no means the whole story of an American election:
character and leadership matter greatly, too. Mr Obama is an impressive
nominee with the potential to be a fine president.

But the road
to the White House is still a hard one. Even though the Republican
brand is as contaminated as a Soviet-era reactor, and 80% of Americans
think the country is on the wrong track, Mr Obama is barely ahead of
his septuagenarian Republican rival. He is less popular than his party
as a whole: in “generic” polling, people prefer Democrats to
Republicans by around 12 points, but Mr Obama is ahead of John McCain
by an average of only around 45% to 43%. One poll this week had Mr
McCain five points ahead. The presidential debates, which will start
next month, usually sway a lot of voters. Mr Obama is generally held to
have lost his only encounter so far with Mr McCain, in back-to-back
interviews with Rick Warren, an evangelical pastor, on August 16th. In
the battleground states which will determine the result, Mr McCain has
steadily been gaining ground; if the polls are borne out, the result,
as in 2000 and 2004, will be nerve-janglingly close.

Many
Americans, including a dangerously large number of Democrats, still
have their doubts about Mr Obama. Some see him as too young and
inexperienced for a dangerous world; others find him unattractively
self-regarding and aloof; still others question his patriotism. Many
resent his apparent flip-flopping on important issues, like gun-control
and whether or not to talk to Iran and Syria, as well as less important
ones, like whether to wear a flag pin. His cynical breaking of a
promise to be bound by federal campaign-finance limits was shabby by
any standards. Perhaps the most damning criticism of him is that he has
never exhibited political courage by daring to take on any of his
party’s powerful interests, as his rival, John McCain, has done over
many issues, including global warming, campaign-finance reform,
immigration and torture.

From the
moment of his coronation in Denver, Mr Obama will have 68 days to allay
these doubts. There is not much he can do about his thin résumé or his
lack of foreign-policy and security expertise, though he can mitigate
the latter somewhat with an astute choice of running mate. And it is a
bit late now for principled stands in the Senate. Mr Obama could
certainly tone down the triumphalism: opting to make his acceptance
speech not in the convention hall but in a 75,000-seater sports stadium
seems like another mistake, akin to his hubristic rock-star’s tour of
Europe. He needs to be a lot clearer and firmer about how he will deal
with America’s foes and rivals: his first instinct when Russia invaded
Georgia was to waffle. Acknowledging that the Iraq surge, which he
tried to block, has worked would also be a sign of tough-mindedness.

Most of all,
he needs to spend those 68 days showing that he understands, and can
connect with, ordinary Americans. The economy ought to be the
Democrats’ trump card, just as security tends to be the Republicans’.
But some of the most surprising recent polls show that Mr Obama is
rated lower by voters on how he would handle the economy than is Mr
McCain, who has admitted that he doesn’t know much about the subject.
That may be because Mr Obama often sounds curiously disconnected from
the troubles of anyone except America’s very poorest. Mrs Clinton was
much better at empathising with middle America, and Mr Obama needs to
show he has learnt from her.

That could
also help heal the wounds of the Democratic Party, which, after the
bitter contest and Mr Obama’s narrow victory, are still raw. If the
Democrats remain divided they will lose the presidency. Were that to
happen, after Iraq, Katrina and an economic crisis, they might well
want to consider an alternative line of work.

LIKE
much else about Barack Obama's campaign, his announcement of a
running-made was unconventional. It came in the form of emails and
text-messages released simultaneously to the tens of thousands of
people who had signed up to receive them, at the distinctly
unconventional hour of 3am Eastern time. “Dear [recipient's name], I
have some important news that I want to make official”, read the
message, purportedly sent by the candidate himself. “I've chosen Joe
Biden to be my running-mate.”

After an
entire week of press-teasing over the timing of the announcement, some
might be forgiven for feeling slightly let down. Mr Biden, a six-term
senator and head of the Senate foreign relations committee, was neither
a surprise nor, for all his qualities, an especially exciting choice,
as the selection of Hillary Clinton or Al Gore would have been.

Yet he brings
highly desirable attributes to the ticket. Most of those who feel
uneasy about an Obama presidency tend to cite his youth and
inexperience, especially of foreign affairs, as their main source of
misgiving. Mr Biden is 65 and was first elected to the Senate by the
people of Delaware when Mr Obama was an 11-year-old schoolboy in
Hawaii. He chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee for eight years; he
became the ranking Democrat on its foreign relations committee in 1997,
and has chaired it from 2001-2003 and again since the start of 2007,
when the Democrats regained control of the Senate. He therefore has all
of the age and foreign-policy experience that Mr Obama lacks.

Naturally,
this can only take him so far with security-conscious wavering voters.
Though Mr Biden voted for the invasion of Iraq (unlike Mr Obama), he
has more recently led the effort to force American troops to quit that
country, even though this would have been seen by many as a defeat for
America. He led Senate efforts to cut off funding to the troops, and to
block George Bush's recent surge. Still, short of co-opting a past or
present soldier, it is hard to think of anyone more suitable on this
score that Mr Obama could have chosen.

Mr Biden's
other big advantage to Mr Obama is that he hails from middle-American
stock. This will help Mr Obama tackle his other perceived great
weakness: his inability to appeal to the white working-close voter.
Born in Scranton, Pennsylvania (though he mostly grew up in the suburbs
of Wilmington, Delaware) as the son of a car salesman, Mr Biden hails
from solid Irish Catholic stock. Catholics are a vital voting block in
some of America's most crucial swing states, such as Ohio and
Pennsylvania. The sort of people who are alarmed by Mr Obama's complex
background ought to be reassured by Mr Biden's much more conventional
one. This may more than compensate for Mr Biden's inability to help
swing a useful home state: Delaware has voted Democratic since 1996,
and carries only three electoral college votes.

As for
disadvantages, there are plainly a couple. Mr Biden is the consummate
Washington insider at a time when people say they are heartily sick of
inside-the-Beltway politicians. Like Mr Obama, he has no executive
experience whatsoever: the dangers of having two senators on the same
ticket are obvious when one considers that no sitting senator has been
elected since 1960 (though then the Kennedy-Johnson ticket, like this
one, was a young senator-old senator match-up). A governor would have
been preferable on these grounds at least.

The other
problem is that Mr Biden is a bit of a wind-bag—known even in
Washington, which is well-used to them, as one of its most notorious
bloviators. His loose tongue can get him into trouble: Britons know him
as a man who plagiarised a speech by a Labour politician, Neil Kinnock;
Americans as a man prone to the occasional racially-insensitive remark.

All that
said, though, Mr Biden was probably the wisest choice that Mr Obama
could have made in the relatively difficult circumstances in which he
now finds himself. His poll lead over John McCain has recently
shrivelled to nothing, and for the first time there seems to be a
genuine possibility that the Democrats could lose the election. If Mr
Biden's selection is followed by a successful convention in Denver,
that perception could flip back again.